Masters of Space docx

Masters of Space Smith, Edward Elmer "Doc" Published: 1961 Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction Source: http://gutenberg.org 1 About Smith: E. E. Smith, also Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., E.E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith, "Skylark" Smith, and (to family) Ted (May 2, 1890 - August 31, 1965) was a food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and science fiction author who wrote the Lensman series and the Skylark series, among others. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks for Smith: • The Galaxy Primes (1959) • Triplanetary (1937) • The Skylark of Space (1928) • Spacehounds of IPC (1931) • Subspace Survivors (1960) • The Vortex Blaster (1941) Also available on Feedbooks for Evans: • Man of Many Minds (1953) Copyright: Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes. 2 Chapter 1 "But didn't you feel anything, Javo?" Strain was apparent in every line of Tula's taut, bare body. "Nothing at all?" "Nothing whatever." The one called Javo relaxed from his rigid con- centration. "Nothing has changed. Nor will it." "That conclusion is indefensible!" Tula snapped. "With the promised return of the Masters there must and will be changes. Didn't any of you feel anything?" Her hot, demanding eyes swept the group; a group whose like, except for physical perfection, could be found in any nudist colony. No one except Tula had felt a thing. "That fact is not too surprising," Javo said finally. "You have the most sensitive receptors of us all. But are you sure?" "I am sure. It was the thought-form of a living Master." "Do you think that the Master perceived your web?" "It is certain. Those who built us are stronger than we." "That is true. As they promised, then, so long and long ago, our Masters are returning home to us." Jarvis Hilton of Terra, the youngest man yet to be assigned to direct any such tremendous deep-space undertaking as Project Theta Orionis, sat in conference with his two seconds-in-command. Assistant Director Sandra Cummings, analyst-synthesist and semantician, was tall, blonde and svelte. Planetographer William Karns—a black-haired, black- browed, black-eyed man of thirty—was third in rank of the scientific group. "I'm telling you, Jarve, you can't have it both ways," Karns declared. "Captain Sawtelle is old-school Navy brass. He goes strictly by the book. So you've got to draw a razor-sharp line; exactly where the Advisory Board's directive puts it. And next time he sticks his ugly puss across that line, kick his face in. You've been Caspar Milquetoast Two ever since we left Base." 3 "That's the way it looks to you?" Hilton's right hand became a fist. "The man has age, experience and ability. I've been trying to meet him on a ground of courtesy and decency." "Exactly. And he doesn't recognize the existence of either. And, since the Board rammed you down his throat instead of giving him old Jeffers, you needn't expect him to." "You may be right, Bill. What do you think, Dr. Cummings?" The girl said: "Bill's right. Also, your constant appeasement isn't doing the morale of the whole scientific group a bit of good." "Well, I haven't enjoyed it, either. So next time I'll pin his ears back. Anything else?" "Yes, Dr. Hilton, I have a squawk of my own. I know I was rammed down your throat, but just when are you going to let me do some work?" "None of us has much of anything to do yet, and won't have until we light somewhere. You're off base a country mile." "I'm not off base. You did want Eggleston, not me." "Sure I did. I've worked with him and know what he can do. But I'm not holding a grudge about it." "No? Why, then, are you on first-name terms with everyone in the sci- entific group except me? Supposedly your first assistant?" "That's easy!" Hilton snapped. "Because you've been carrying chips on both shoulders ever since you came aboard … or at least I thought you were." Hilton grinned suddenly and held out his hand. "Sorry, Sandy—I'll start all over again." "I'm sorry too, Chief." They shook hands warmly. "I was pretty stiff, I guess, but I'll be good." "You'll go to work right now, too. As semantician. Dig out that direct- ive and tear it down. Draw that line Bill talked about." "Can do, boss." She swung to her feet and walked out of the room, her every movement one of lithe and easy grace. Karns followed her with his eyes. "Funny. A trained-dancer Ph.D. And a Miss America type, like all the other women aboard this spacer. I won- der if she'll make out." "So do I. I still wish they'd given me Eggy. I've never seen an executive-type female Ph.D. yet that was worth the cyanide it would take to poison her." "That's what Sawtelle thinks of you, too, you know." "I know; and the Board does know its stuff. So I'm really hoping, Bill, that she surprises me as much as I intend to surprise the Navy." 4 Alarm bells clanged as the mighty Perseus blinked out of overdrive. Every crewman sprang to his post. "Mister Snowden, why did we emerge without orders from me?" Cap- tain Sawtelle bellowed, storming into the control room three jumps be- hind Hilton. "The automatics took control, sir," he said, quietly. "Automatics! I give the orders!" "In this case, Captain Sawtelle, you don't," Hilton said. Eyes locked and held. To Sawtelle, this was a new and strange co-commander. "I would suggest that we discuss this matter in private." "Very well, sir," Sawtelle said; and in the captain's cabin Hilton opened up. "For your information, Captain Sawtelle, I set my inter-space coupling detectors for any objective I choose. When any one of them reacts, it trips the kickers and we emerge. During any emergency outside the Solar Sys- tem I am in command—with the provision that I must relinquish com- mand to you in case of armed attack on us." "Where do you think you found any such stuff as that in the directive? It isn't there and I know my rights." "It is, and you don't. Here is a semantic chart of the whole directive. As you will note, it overrides many Navy regulations. Disobedience of my orders constitutes mutiny and I can—and will—have you put in irons and sent back to Terra for court-martial. Now let's go back." In the control room, Hilton said, "The target has a mass of approxim- ately five hundred metric tons. There is also a significant amount of radi- ation characteristic of uranexite. You will please execute search, Captain Sawtelle." And Captain Sawtelle ordered the search. "What did you do to the big jerk, boss?" Sandra whispered. "What you and Bill suggested," Hilton whispered back. "Thanks to your analysis of the directive—pure gobbledygook if there ever was any—I could. Mighty good job, Sandy." Ten or fifteen more minutes passed. Then: "Here's the source of radiation, sir," a searchman reported. "It's a point source, though, not an object at this range." "And here's the artifact, sir," Pilot Snowden said. "We're coming up on it fast. But … but what's a skyscraper skeleton doing out here in interstel- lar space?" 5 As they closed up, everyone could see that the thing did indeed look like the metallic skeleton of a great building. It was a huge cube, measur- ing well over a hundred yards along each edge. And it was empty. "That's one for the book," Sawtelle said. "And how!" Hilton agreed. "I'll take a boat … no, suits would be better. Karns, Yarborough, get Techs Leeds and Miller and suit up." "You'll need a boat escort," Sawtelle said. "Mr. Ashley, execute escort Landing Craft One, Two, and Three." The three landing craft approached that enigmatic lattice-work of structural steel and stopped. Five grotesquely armored figures wafted themselves forward on pencils of force. Their leader, whose suit bore the number "14", reached a mammoth girder and worked his way along it up to a peculiar-looking bulge. The whole immense structure vanished, leaving men and boats in empty space. Sawtelle gasped. "Snowden! Are you holding 'em?" "No, sir. Faster than light; hyperspace, sir." "Mr. Ashby, did you have your interspace rigs set?" "No, sir. I didn't think of it, sir." "Doctor Cummings, why weren't yours out?" "I didn't think of such a thing, either—any more than you did," Sandra said. Ashby, the Communications Officer, had been working the radio. "No reply from anyone, sir," he reported. "Oh, no!" Sandra exclaimed. Then, "But look! They're firing pis- tols—especially the one wearing number fourteen—but pistols?" "Recoil pistols—sixty-threes—for emergency use in case of power fail- ure," Ashby explained. "That's it … but I can't see why all their power went out at once. But Fourteen—that's Hilton—is really doing a job with that sixty-three. He'll be here in a couple of minutes." And he was. "Every power unit out there—suits and boats both—drained," Hilton reported. "Completely drained. Get some help out there fast!" In an enormous structure deep below the surface of a far-distant world a group of technicians clustered together in front of one section of a two- miles long control board. They were staring at a light that had just ap- peared where no light should have been. "Someone's brain-pan will be burned out for this," one of the group ra- diated harshly. "That unit was inactivated long ago and it has not been reactivated." 6 "Someone committed an error, Your Loftiness?" "Silence, fool! Stretts do not commit errors!" As soon as it was clear that no one had been injured, Sawtelle deman- ded, "How about it, Hilton?" "Structurally, it was high-alloy steel. There were many bulges, possibly containing mechanisms. There were drive-units of a non-Terran type. There were many projectors, which—at a rough guess—were a hundred times as powerful as any I have ever seen before. There were no indica- tions that the thing had ever been enclosed, in whole or in part. It cer- tainly never had living quarters for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing eaters of organic food." Sawtelle snorted. "You mean it never had a crew?" "Not necessarily… ." "Bah! What other kind of intelligent life is there?" "I don't know. But before we speculate too much, let's look at the tri-di. The camera may have caught something I missed." It hadn't. The three-dimensional pictures added nothing. "It probably was operated either by programmed automatics or by re- mote control," Hilton decided, finally. "But how did they drain all our power? And just as bad, what and how is that other point source of power we're heading for now?" "What's wrong with it?" Sawtelle asked. "Its strength. No matter what distance or reactant I assume, nothing we know will fit. Neither fission nor fusion will do it. It has to be practic- ally total conversion!" 7 Chapter 2 The Perseus snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and Hilton stared, motionless and silent. Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were bare, giant skeletons of steel, like the "derelict" that had so unexpectedly blasted away from them. The others were more or less like the Perseus, except in being bigger, faster and of vastly greater power. Beams of starkly incredible power bit at and clung to equally capable defensive screens of pure force. As these inconceivable forces met, the glare of their neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and skelet- ons alike were disappearing in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers and sparkles of rended, fused and vaporized metal. Hilton watched two ships combine against one skeleton. Dozens of beams, incredibly tight and hard, were held inexorably upon dozens of the bulges of the skeleton. Overloaded, the bulges' screens flared through the spectrum and failed. And bare metal, however refractory, endures only for instants under the appalling intensity of such beams as those. The skeletons tried to duplicate the ships' method of attack, but failed. They were too slow. Not slow, exactly, either, but hesitant; as though it required whole seconds for the commander—or operator? Or remote controller?—of each skeleton to make it act. The ships were winning. "Hey!" Hilton yelped. "Oh—that's the one we saw back there. But what in all space does it think it's doing?" It was plunging at tremendous speed straight through the immense fleet of embattled skeletons. It did not fire a beam nor energize a screen; it merely plunged along as though on a plotted course until it collided with one of the skeletons of the fleet and both structures plunged, a tangled mass of wreckage, to the ground of the planet below. Then hundreds of the ships shot forward, each to plunge into and ex- plode inside one of the skeletons. When visibility was restored another wave of ships came forward to repeat the performance, but there was 8 nothing left to fight. Every surviving skeleton had blinked out of normal space. The remaining ships made no effort to pursue the skeletons, nor did they re-form as a fleet. Each ship went off by itself. And on that distant planet of the Stretts the group of mechs watched with amazed disbelief as light after light after light winked out on their two-miles-long control board. Frantically they relayed orders to the skel- etons; orders which did not affect the losses. "Brain-pans will blacken for this … " a mental snarl began, to be inter- rupted by a coldly imperious thought. "That long-dead unit, so inexplicably reactivated, is approaching the fuel world. It is ignoring the battle. It is heading through our fleet to- ward the Oman half … handle it, ten-eighteen!" "It does not respond, Your Loftiness." "Then blast it, fool! Ah, it is inactivated. As encyclopedist, Nine, ex- plain the freakish behavior of that unit." "Yes, Your Loftiness. Many cycles ago we sent a ship against the Omans with a new device of destruction. The Omans must have inter- cepted it, drained it of power and allowed it to drift on. After all these cycles of time it must have come upon a small source of power and of course continued its mission." "That can be the truth. The Lords of the Universe must be informed." "The mining units, the carriers and the refiners have not been affected, Your Loftiness," a mech radiated. "So I see, fool." Then, activating another instrument, His Loftiness thought at it, in an entirely different vein, "Lord Ynos, Madam? I have to make a very grave report… ." In the Perseus, four scientists and three Navy officers were arguing heatedly; employing deep-space verbiage not to be found in any diction- ary. "Jarve!" Karns called out, and Hilton joined the group. "Does any- thing about this planet make any sense to you?" "No. But you're the planetographer. 'Smatter with it?" "It's a good three hundred degrees Kelvin too hot." "Well, you know it's loaded with uranexite." "That much? The whole crust practically jewelry ore?" "If that's what the figures say, I'll buy it." "Buy this, then. Continuous daylight everywhere. Noon June Sol-qual- ity light except that it's all in the visible. Frank says it's from 9 bombardment of a layer of something, and Frank admits that the whole thing's impossible." "When Frank makes up his mind what 'something' is, I'll take it as a datum." "Third thing: there's only one city on this continent, and it's protected by a screen that nobody ever heard of." Hilton pondered, then turned to the captain. "Will you please run a search-pattern, sir? Fine-toothing only the hot spots?" The planet was approximately the same size as Terra; its atmosphere, except for its intense radiation, was similar to Terra's. There were two continents; one immense girdling ocean. The temperature of the land surface was everywhere about 100°F, that of the water about 90°F. Each continent had one city, and both were small. One was inhabited by what looked like human beings; the other by usuform robots. The human city was the only cool spot on the entire planet; under its protective dome the temperature was 71°F. Hilton decided to study the robots first; and asked the captain to take the ship down to observation range. Sawtelle objected; and continued to object until Hilton started to order his arrest. Then he said, "I'll do it, un- der protest, but I want it on record that I am doing it against my best judgment." "It's on record," Hilton said, coldly. "Everything said and done is be- ing, and will continue to be, recorded." The Perseus floated downward. "There's what I want most to see," Hilton said, finally. "That big strip-mining operation … that's it … hold it!" Then, via throat-mike, "Attention, all scientists! You all know what to do. Start doing it." Sandra's blonde head was very close to Hilton's brown one as they both stared into Hilton's plate. "Why, they look like giant armadillos!" she exclaimed. "More like tanks," he disagreed, "except that they've got legs, wheels and treads—and arms, cutters, diggers, probes and conveyors—and look at the way those buckets dip solid rock!" The fantastic machine was moving very slowly along a bench or shelf that it was making for itself as it went along. Below it, to its left, dropped other benches being made by other mining machines. The machines were not using explosives. Hard though the ore was, the tools were so much harder and were driven with such tremendous power that the stuff might just have well have been slightly-clayed sand. 10 [...]... Sandy would sit in the office and analyze and synthesize and correlate It was a very nice plan It was a very nice office, too It contained every item of equipment that either Sandra or Hilton had ever worked with—it was a big office—and a great many that neither of them had ever heard of It had a full staff of Omans, all eager to work Hilton and Sandra sat in that magnificent office for three hours,... a few of the problems we face." 23 "The Omans The Masters The upgrading of the armament of the Perseus to Oman standards The concentration of uranexite What is that concentrate? How is it used? Total conversion—how is it accomplished? The skeletons—what are they and how are they controlled? Their ability to drain power Who or what is back of them? Why a deadlock that has lasted over a quarter of a million... like it You've noticed, of course, the accent on youth The Navy crew is normal, except for the commanders being unusually young But we aren't None of us is thirty yet, and none of us has ever been married You fellows look like a team of professional athletes, and you girls—well, if I didn't know better I'd say the Board had screened you for the front row of the chorus instead of for a top-bracket brain-gang...Every bit of loosened ore, down to the finest dust, was forced into a conveyor and thence into the armored body of the machine There it went into a mechanism whose basic principles Hilton could not understand From this monstrosity emerged two streams of product One of these, comprising ninety-nine point nine plus percent of the input, went out through another conveyor into the vast hold of a vehicle... happy After tens of thousands of cycles of time they were doing a job for their adored, their revered and beloved MASTERS That was a stunning shock; but it was eclipsed by another "I am sorry, Master Hilton," Laro's tremendous bass voice boomed out, "that it has taken us so long to learn your Masters' language as it now is Since you left us you have changed it radically; while we, of course, have not... they considered both 'Golden' and 'Silver'!" Not at all obviously, he studied her: the almost translucent, unblemished perfection of her lightly-tanned, old-ivory skin; the clear, calm, deep blueness of her eyes; the long, thick mane of hair exactly the color of a field of dead-ripe wheat "You know, I like it," he said then "It fits you." "I'm glad you said that, Doctor… " "Not that, Temple I'm not... know, were any of our ancestors ever here." 21 "You need not test us, Master We have kept your trust Everything has been kept, changelessly the same, awaiting your return as you ordered so long ago." "Can you read my mind?" Hilton demanded "Of course; but Omans can not read in Masters' minds anything except what Masters want Omans to read." "Omans?" Harkins asked "Where did you Omans and your masters come... "Especially with half a dozen of those other cats watching? Just wait and see, boss!" Sandra and her two guests came aboard The natives looked around; the man at the various human men, the woman at each of the human women The woman remained beside Sandra; the man took his place at Hilton's left, looking up—he was a couple of inches shorter than Hilton's six feet one—with an air of … of expectancy! "Why this... until after I you've studied it." "Why, I won't, of course… " Her voice died away "Maybe you'd better cancel that 'of course'… " She studied, and when she spoke again she was exerting self-control "A chemist, a planetographer, a theoretician, two sociologists, a psychologist and a radiationist And six of the seven are three pairs of sweeties What kind of a line-up is that to solve a problem in physics?"... very much like Terra There were continents, oceans, ice-caps, lakes, rivers, mountains and plains, forests and prairies The ship landed on the spacefield of Omlu, the City of the Masters, and Sawtelle called Hilton into his cabin The Omans Laro and Kedo went along, of course "Nobody knows how it leaked … " Sawtelle began "No secrets around here," Hilton grinned "Omans, you know." "I suppose so Anyway, . Skylark of Space (1928) • Spacehounds of IPC (1931) • Subspace Survivors (1960) • The Vortex Blaster (1941) Also available on Feedbooks for Evans: • Man of. snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and Hilton stared, motionless and silent. Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were